My great-grandfather John Hill

I have recently become interested in family history, and my family have shared with me some of their interesting findings. For example, my family are distantly related to the legendary Wild West lawman Wyatt Earp and the designer and poet William Morris. I was very interested to learn more about my great-grandfather John Hill, who seems to be the person who established my family in Burton-upon-Trent.

How Deaf people were affected by the pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic had a huge impact on the world, but you may not have considered how it specifically impacted Deaf people. 

Student Christmas Event  

It was 20 years ago when one of my students first suggested that the class should get together for a Christmas drink, and it was a huge success, so it became something I arranged each year since. It was a great opportunity for students to meet with people with different levels of British Sign Language (BSL) skills. Of course, it's very early days for Level 1 students who have only been signing for a couple of months, but everyone is very friendly and happy to help them.

Deaf social events 

The Deaf community has a strong history of running social events where Deaf people can meet up and socialise using their first language, British Sign Language (BSL). There is a documentary called Power in Our Hands, which talks about Deaf people’s struggle to gain civil rights, which includes old footage of Deaf people and their families attending events together; it shows them relaxed and happy, socialising with other members of the community and communicating with ease.

My holiday to Israel – October 2019

In October, I went to Israel for a week with a group of 45 deaf people from across the UK , along with two qualified British Sign Language (BSL) interpreters. 

Deaf people and technology

You may not be aware of the range of equipment available to support deaf people in their daily lives. This is another area which has improved greatly since my childhood. 

When I was a child in the 1970s, we had an old black‑and‑white television in the living room. Obviously, technology was not at a point whereby there were captions or in-vision interpreters, so I watched the pictures move across the screen and tried to make sense of what was happening. I also relied on my mum to fill in the parts I couldn’t catch, but she didn’t use British Sign Language (BSL), so it meant that I had to lip-read (remember, lipreading is 90% guess work) and only got brief snippets of information. I was about five or six when we finally got a colour television, a set we rented from the Co‑op, and it felt unbelievably exciting.

Deaf people can often feel very isolated in a group of hearing people. I love my family, but I hated family occasions growing up, because I was always left out of the conversation and left wondering what was going. With a little basic deaf awareness you can involve deaf people, and stop them having to experience this.